In modern society, health care and dental care workers, scientific laboratory workers, and myriad others often strive to preserve an environment in as sterile and uncontaminated a condition as possible in ongoing efforts to lessen contamination from one object to another.
Efforts are made by doctors, nurses, technicians, and other health care workers to guard against infection and efforts are made to create and preserve sterile environments and sterile fields in hospital and health care facilities and emergency health care environments, such as intensive care units, operating rooms, x-ray units, examination rooms, laboratories, emergency rooms, emergency response units, and ambulances. Sterile packaging for many health care goods and equipment is often encountered.
Various devices are used to package, shield or otherwise minimize cross contamination. In a typical hospital, a person can find many examples of sterile containers and bags made out of flexible plastic materials.
Dental workers including dentists also strive to lessen transmission of disease and contamination from one patient to another by sterilizing dental instruments and using antifomitic covers on various pieces of dental equipment.
Other people also are interested in lessening cross contamination in places such as industrial clean rooms, industrial and scientific laboratories, and various manufacturing production facilities.
Most if not all of the preceding people from time to time have used and will continue to use writing utensils (commonly ball point pens) in their environments. An object of the present invention is to lessen the likelihood of substantial contamination of an environment by a writing utensil or of a writing utensil by an environment.
A further object of the invention is to provide a system for helping prevent the transmission of infection and/or disease via a contaminated writing utensil having a writing tip from one patient to another patient by isolating the writing utensil except for the writing tip in a disposable, biologically impermeable cover. Preferably, a plurality of nesting writing utensil covers are nested together and used to isolate a writing utensil except for its writing tip and after use of the covered writing utensil in an environment with a patient, the outer writing utensil cover may be removed or replaced before use of the still covered writing utensil in an environment with another patient.
Another object of the invention is to increase the awareness of people to potential avenues of cross contamination that frequently have been overlooked in the past.
The present invention relates to a novel cover, nesting covers, and methods of use of the covers to help minimize contamination between an environment and a writing utensil used by a person who interacts with the environment. The cover also permits a person to use a personally preferred writing utensil such as an expensive ball-point pen, a graduation gift or other pen or writing instrument with less chance of contamination of the writing instrument by the environment or contamination of the environment by the writing utensil. Preferably, the person uses the present invention and inserts a writing utensil into a plurality of nesting covers before introducing the writing utensil into an environment.
A further object of the invention is to minimize the portion of a writing utensil exposed to an environment to a small portion in the immediate vicinity of a writing tip of the writing utensil.